About

I am Lubix Slumbarave. I don’t know why, but I have a strong urge to subvert. It’s not a recent thing. As time goes on, I try to channel this desire to subvert through positive means, and as an artist this is often expressed through my need to create.

I have been underground for a while, for various reasons. Not least because of how the pressure to ‘bring in the dolla’ can make an artist stray the path. But alas, the force is in me, and it will always come forth, and not a moment too soon.

An undercurrent thematic to my creative ideas has always simmered away as need to use household items, particularly bedroom paraphernalia in my work, be it within the events industry as demonstrated by the many years of creating SLUMBARAVE pajama parties and gallery shows, or through the teddy bear taxidermy days. In my younger years I produced a collection of ladies street-wear themed around ‘subverting the submissive housewife’ and surprisingly sold in Goa to trance party people. That was another story.

I studied fashion many moons ago, around the same time I became active within the protest movement in the 1990’s. I began to get my teeth into counter-culture and this, back then, naturally traversed the festival scene in the UK. In turn, what seemed to be a common thread between these subcultural facets of pre-noughties Britain, was a surge of awareness concerning our Environment. New Age Travellers were living ‘low impact’ and many were deeply rooted in the road protests of  that time, I even spent many a night swaying 40ft up an Oak tree in a hammock really, feeling the pain of loosing our forest.

My choice of studies and my passion for fashion soon made me feel I was living the life of an oxymoron, and contemplated how I could fuse my morals and my flair together. I learned that the textile industry was one of the most pollutive industries, particularly cotton, and researched into alternative textile production and the use of recycled fabrics within fashion. I looked into marketing what was becoming known as ethical fashion, but soon realised that it was fashion itself that was the problem; the ever-changing and consequently disposable nature of fashion and our unquenchable desire for the new, that fed this particular department of the monster known as mass consumption.

The process culminated in me writing my final dissertation on Fashion Design, about anti-fashion, and how I had observed through my submersion in sub culture in the 1990’s, that there seem to be a trend towards a modern primitivism; a back to basics nod towards tribalism which was, whilst promoting a less consumptive lifestyle, still very much identified with its own style. Body piercing and tribal art tattoo’s were still at this time very much undercurrent trends and looked down upon by mainstream culture.

The creative intuit in me summoned a post-apocalyptic vision of this era of mass consumption, and I naturally leaned towards using archetypal symbols of female domesticity and subjugation in my work.

I grew up with Carry On movies, Benny Hill, Diana Dors and British seaside holiday flats. My dads taste in Axminster carpets and 70’s furniture and my passionate obsession with bed-covers and quilts naturally set me up at an early age to appreciate all things kitsch, but I was  born a ‘juxtas poser’, and always deviated towards bastardization of these fetishistic symbols of my creative youth.

I love the honest truth of painting a portrait, and aside fucking up shit with household junk, I like to paint people.